Why's that? I personally didn't enjoy having to fight everything everywhere in pre-BC, for me flying mounts were a natural successor to ground mounts, the only mistake is not having made interesting aerial combat for them to respect their Gryphon Rider Warcraft 2 roots.

Doing Isle of Thunder dailies reminds me how much I hated ground mounts only, not to mention leveling any alts in pandaria after you've experienced the lore and environments once on your main.

At least in WOTLK they had the decency to give us those tomes to learn to fly at 80.

The number of people playing Wow is around 865,000 worldwide. There haven't even been over a million paid subs for a few months now, and they were below 2mil for almost all of last year. Since only 5 million or so copies of Mop have been sold, kinda hard to have 8 million subs...

The number of people playing Wow is around 865,000 worldwide. There haven't even been over a million paid subs for a few months now, and they were below 2mil for almost all of last year. Since only 5 million or so copies of Mop have been sold, kinda hard to have 8 million subs...

lol @ completely making up numbers.
in my opinion swtor has a billion subs and wow 100.000

Since they have no active subscriptions, they are not called upon to account for the number of active accounts.

And Blizzard does count inactive accounts within its fiogures... FACT.

I think it was Mike Morhaime (or another high ranking Blizzard employee) who did an interview (i think for the financial press) back in Wrath where he admitted that only around 50% of Wow subsciptions login more than once per month. He went on to say its a concern for Blizzard and they want to encourage those players to login more. Thats a fukking hell of alot of inactive accounts which r paying cash to Blizzard every month.

So basically at any one time around 50% of Blizzard subs r actually logging in more than once per month... the other 50% dont login but they still pay their monthly subs.

This is no different to games like GW2. Sure not everyone who bought GW2 logs in regularly... but *drum roll* that was exactly how the game was designed to be! *shock horror face!*

Basically Blizzard does not release how many people login every month and nor does GW2... its the same.

GW2 shows how many unit sales they made and Wow shows how many monthly subscriptions is has.

The exact same people that dislike WoW and those that like WoW flock to it and regurgitate the exact same nonsense back and forth for the Nth time.

OT: Overall, retail sails are down but digital sales are up. That is fairly common knowledge these days. As for WoW subs declining, there are a multitude of reasons. It's old, people have moved on, people don't have the cash for it, people dislike it.... and so on...

Nothing has ruined WoW but the community itself. Not flying mounts, not RBGs, not dailies, not LFD or even LFR. The players. Tell me about server rep all you like but the fact is that it was an illusion. You were simply in a friendly guild and knew a few other people on the server. But of course, this has to be exaggerated to make a point. Flying mounts actually increase immersion (imo, it's flying on dragons in a fantasy game... immersion). World PvP? It died when Battlegrounds were introduced. Instead, it's players trying to dictate how people have fun, trying to remove content for people they deem less than themselves, trying to claim their blatant nostalgia proves the game was always better at this exact time and any other opinion is just wrong. Players are also trying to exclude others from content (hell thread asking to stagger LFR tiers by 6 months) and it's the attitude players take with each other that harms the game more than anything else.

Stop beating the same old dead horses and just leave them be. Either play the game if you still enjoy it or move on from the game if you dislike it so much that you have to argue with random people on the internet.

So I saw an article with this chart in it. It shows that since 2010 when WoW was at it's peak, amount of money people spend on games and PC games has declined each subsequent year. To me this clearly shows that WoW's decline isn't some crazy "Blizzard is awful, Ghostcrawler is an idiot" but is largely a reflection on the changing preferences of consumers.

I don't know how, in a market like that, anyone would expect WoWs subs to not decline noticeably.

Fortunately several other people have pointed out how easy it is to misinterpret statistics so I don't have to.

My only comment will be that WoW is an old game, and if anybody is expecting it to continue growing or maintain its peak, then you're fairly delusional. Of course its going to start dropping off, especially when "its the same old shit" every expansion. They do a FANTASTIC job, don't get me wrong, but its still the same game no matter what sword the boss is holding or what color the dungeon is, nobody is going to play forever and there are many other games now to consider playing than WoW for newcomers to the market. WoW originated as a cutting edge MMO, it is no longer and will continue to decline without serious overhaul that changes the game entirely. The veteran players get bored and move on. Game companies don't recognize the effect veterans have on the community. If you don't keep them interested you will fail.

How many of these thread do you want.
Just to quote from the last link:

"Video game retail sales declined for the twelfth consecutive month in November 2012. According to market research firm NPD, U.S video game store sales slumped 11.0% year over year to $2.25 billion in the month of November."

And the year before that you had the same rate...

As of the start of 2013 it has been worse even.

---
But within this video game business ... ALL those latest sub based MMORPG that needed to go free to play to survive is freightening even....

Tbh i dont really care about those stats. Are they worlwide? Or only US? Retail stores? Or online buys? Most people buy games online nowadays, you know, as with lots of other things.

With the human population growing, games getting better and better, I refuse to believe that gaming is in a decline because some site i never heard of has some article and statistics which are probably not even accurate.

Tbh i dont really care about those stats. Are they worlwide? Or only US? Retail stores? Or online buys? Most people buy games online nowadays, you know, as with lots of other things.

With the human population growing, games getting better and better, I refuse to believe that gaming is in a decline because some site i never heard of has some article and statistics which are probably not even accurate.

Benbos has been proven wrong by many people in this thread... dont worry hes shut up now

And Blizzard does count inactive accounts within its fiogures... FACT.

Don't be obtuse.

Morhaime is talking about people with who are still subscribers who are paying but not logging in (there are many people like this). They count that as revenue, because its money coming in, even if the account is considered inactive. It is still income counted in a financial statement.

GW2 has no subscription, so whether or not people are playing does not impact their bottom line (outside of operating costs). It certainly does not bring any revenue in. Anyone playing is a POTENTIAL source of revenue post-box-sale, but POTENTIAL doesn't mean anything in a financial statement.

ArenaNet is counting its gem store revenue, Blizzard is counting the income from not only their own store and services, but also their subscriptions. And in fact, only people with active accounts.

The difference is that with Blizzard, you have an active metric of people who are putting money into the game, because they report subscriber numbers, which people harp on. Since there is no such model in GW2, you only have revenue from box sales and gem sales. The 1st quarter of this year showed a substantial dip following the previous quarter, which was part of the GW2 hype and Christmas season. Second quarter financials will probably be very telling. Another drop off would infer that GW2 is actually nowhere near as sustainable as WoW. Again, since GW2 posts fewer metrics than WoW, stating how many people are playing it is pure speculation.

All we know is that its hit 3 million, but not 4 million. If it had hit 4 million, they'd be crowing from the rooftops about it. But they say nothing about what their retention rate is, just the box sales. And the gem store is a major part of their financial model, otherwise they wouldn't push a new lottery box every 2-4 weeks.

Morhaime is talking about people with who are still subscribers who are paying but not logging in (there are many people like this). They count that as revenue, because its money coming in, even if the account is considered inactive. It is still income counted in a financial statement.

That was precisely my point...

GW2 got the money they wanted when they sold the game... if u login after that isnt an issue. Blizzard gets their money every month from your sub regardless if players login or not.

Both of these games have inactive accounts and both of them do not release how many do or dont login.

basically it was pointless bringing this up in the first place... thats my point.

Tbh i dont really care about those stats. Are they worlwide? Or only US? Retail stores? Or online buys? Most people buy games online nowadays, you know, as with lots of other things.

With the human population growing, games getting better and better, I refuse to believe that gaming is in a decline because some site i never heard of has some article and statistics which are probably not even accurate.

You may refuse to think the video game sales are in decline, but my links above proved the opposite.

The reason is simple: people "play" social media these days instead of playing video games.

Like the article said: iPads and other social media "games" replaced traditional video gaming (MMORPG play included).

Of course F2P models for MMORPG's are a last straw to save the furniture ...

Those thinking this is just a lull between new consoles ...

yeah the new Sony portable and WII U are doing "fantastic" isn't it ...

---------- Post added 2013-06-26 at 08:51 PM ----------

Originally Posted by tenzing21

The number of people playing Wow is around 865,000 worldwide. There haven't even been over a million paid subs for a few months now, and they were below 2mil for almost all of last year. Since only 5 million or so copies of Mop have been sold, kinda hard to have 8 million subs...

Yep and in the latest quarter (a quarter = 3 months just to be sure you can count) ... WOW made 275 million dollars (GAAP !) from Blizzard selling Columbian drugs too !

I was picking Benbos up on his claim over the past 2 years... and in the past 2 years most have LAUNCHED as F2P or B2P. Therefore accusations of them failing are totally unwarranted.

GW2 for example is still growing and its been out almost a year now.

Diablo 3 is still beating it.

really?

Ive played all the other MMOs out there and quality isnt much different. Theyve simply invested in different parts of their MMO. Some dont have raiding, others invested in massive PvP worlds. Others invested heavily in story and questing.

This idea of quality is totally subjective, afterall Wow looks the most out of date graphically than all of them yet that doesnt effect their subs much.

Basically there isnt much difference in quality between F2P or B2P games to Wow or Eve, who are pretty much the only paid subs MMO games out there right now.

I disagree. The quality of pc gaming in general was slowly declining. Sure you had your hits but more and more games were coming out with stop bugs, unfinished endings or unusable multiplayer. WoW's quality forced companies to step up because it was embarrassing. Electronic Arts was one of the most guilty publishers at the time.

Aside from launch day or planned maintenance you are guaranteed that you can login to WoW and do virtually anything that's advertised. That wasn't always the case in many other games. So yes the quality of WoW has pushed the industry to be better as a whole.

But if you want to talk about content quality I have been through EQ, EQ2, Dark Age of Camelot, Guild Wars, City of Heroes, Age of Conan, Asheron's Call, Warhammer Online, Swtor, Rift and recently dabbled in Neverwinter. The only ones worth a damn in that list was EQ, Daoc and City of Heroes. The rest were infested with bugs, unfinished content and lag.

Bugs to me are stop problems that prevent me from playing the game. Stuck on an island, unable to zone, npc stuck 100 feet in the air or under the damn world, can't complete a quest. Having a NPC be missing a head, my cloak not displaying, walking animation gone, etc are cosmetic and don't limit my gameplay.

WoW does not look out of date in MOP and even most of Cataclysm which is where the game is current. You need a computer capable of displaying this on Ultra but it's there. WoW has the cartoon feel to it so if compared to say Neverwinter, Rift or SWTOR it looks less realistic but overall detail is the same.

this is BenBos you are talking to. he doesnt read anything you write, at least not properly. his standard practice is to pick up a couple of sentences, deliberately misunderstand them, then repeat the same tired lines he uses every time, in every thread. and even when you do pick apart his points to prove he is completely, hilariously wrong, he just ignores you and carries on repeating the same nonsense.

nice to see his old "GW2 doesnt even have mounts!" line making a return. thought that one had been put out to pasture.

The only ones NOT reading my links are the usual suspects.

So I repeat nonsense by stating (and proving) that a subscription model is by far the BEST way to collect resources (money) for having extreme polished open world play in ever lasting adventures in MMORPG ?

---

Ok So then ... Does GW2 have mounts now to replace their loading screens ? Nope.

Does GW2 have an open ended world you can cross without loading screens ? Nope.

Does it have ANY other transportation to jump from one instance to another than a loading screen ? Nope.

GW2 is sewed together with loading screens to jump from one instanced map to another. Someone should tell GW2 fans the wheel was invented thousands of years ago already.

And 75 million dollars over 2 years (in sold boxes - deducting retail/distribution costs) is not going to change that in the future either.

Bottom line : a GOOD open world MMORPG with decent polish AND state of the art background loading worlds that expand endlessly is not supported by B2P or F2P mechanics.

"Sales of packaged game products are sinking as more consumers download games on smartphones and tablet.

And what did I write ?

"iPads and other social media "games" replaced traditional video gaming (MMORPG play included)."

It shows you simply flip when you see BenBos .

Ough, that hurt didn't it ?

The second word in the article is "RETAIL" the actual quote that is relevant is "U.S. retail sales of video-game hardware, software and accessories fell 25 percent to $495.2 million last month, as consumers shifted to digital titles played on mobile devices and awaited next-generation consoles." Honestly there is no hope if you cannot even read the links that supposedly prove your point.

The second word in the article is "RETAIL" the actual quote that is relevant is "U.S. retail sales of video-game hardware, software and accessories fell 25 percent to $495.2 million last month, as consumers shifted to digital titles played on mobile devices and awaited next-generation consoles." Honestly there is no hope if you cannot even read the links that supposedly prove your point.

While you left out: "Sales of packaged game products are sinking as more consumers download games on smartphones and tablet..."

... which I alluded to by stating people "play" now the social media.

You are being intellectual dishonest by NOT citing the sentences I alluded to. Simple as that.